He was an early employee of Amazon.com, made a lot of money on stock options, spent it all, and had to re-enter the rat race with a decade-sized hole in his resume. He spent a good portion of his temporary, early retirement studying NLP, public speaking, and leadership while working to establish himself as a web-cartoonist. During this period he also traveled repeatedly to the Peruvian Amazon to participate in Ayahuasca ceremonies.

Libertarian ideology and techno-utopian fantasies are very attractive and self-validating when one is living on the proceeds of an internet stock-option windfall. They are less attractive and self-validating when scrambling to earn a living and starting from scratch in middle age. The six year arc of the C-Realm Podcast provides an unintended look into KMO’s evolving worldview.

Within a couple of months of learning of the existence of podcasts he was creating weekly episodes of the C-Realm Podcast. That was in 2006. Since then he has conducted over 300 podcast interviews on topics ranging from organic farming and permaculture, peak oil and the collapse of industrial civilization, to psychedelic spirituality and drug policy reform.

Doug Lain, creator of the Diet Soap on-line zine (later to manifest as the Diet Soap Podcast) wrote, “KMO was once a winner in the capitalist game. He had high tech dreams and plenty of ambition, but somewhere along the line KMO dropped out, spent what he had, and started over in a simpler way. No longer rich and no longer so enamored with the technocratic fantasies of the prevailing order, he squeaks by in this world while seeking another. More than anything KMO is a broadcaster and interviewer who has a gentle and amiable way of challenging and inspiring interesting conversations with authors, artists, psychedelic gurus, sociologists, NASA scientists, economists, and more on his weekly podcast called the C-Realm.”

In addition to the C-Realm and C-Realm Vault Podcasts, KMO is the co-host of the Z-Realm Podcast with Marty and the Lovely Olga K. He also teams up with Olga to create the monthly Psychonautica Podcast for the Dopefiend.co.uk Podcast Network. While at the Ecovillage Training Center, KMO published several episodes of the ETC Voices Podcast.

Can commons-oriented peer production be applied to material production? Will activists and contributors to the commons always be forced to work within capitalist structures to subsist while investing their available free time in volunteer activities? How can we create socially-oriented companies without the start-up capital to fund them? Is there a model that will allow us to make a living, produce goods and services and even compete with the dominant hegemony?

“What we have is multimodal environment, and I think we need to look at the economy as having multiple modes of production happening at all given times. I don’t think it should be our objective to try to figure out how we can flip from one to the other, but how we can increase the kinds of producing and sharing that we think are beneficial and want more of and decrease the amount of producing and sharing that happens at ways that we think are destructive and not beneficial, and that we want less of. “